This application is based on Japanese Patent Application No. 10-322445 filed in Japan, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to image processing systems, and particularly, to an image processing system including a plurality of image processors that process input image data divisionally in parallel.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional image processing system that processes a great amount of documents efficiently using an automatic document feeder (ADF) is well known. The processed documents include a color document (document constituted by data of a plurality of colors) and a monochromatic (single color) document.
An object of the present invention is to improve the processing speed of an image processing system.
According to an aspect of the present invention, an image data processing apparatus includes a determination unit determining whether image data to be processed represents a monochromatic image or a color image, and a processing unit processing image data.
The processing unit includes a plurality of processors processing image data divisionally in parallel, and a control unit assigning image data to be processed to each processor according to the determination result of the determination unit.
According to another aspect of the present invention, an image data processing method includes the steps of determining whether image data to be processed represents a monochromatic image or a color image, dividing image data to be processed into a plurality of blocks and assigning the divided image data to a plurality of processors according to the determination result of the determination step, and processing in parallel the image data assigned in the assignment step with the plurality of processors.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, an image data processing apparatus includes an image reader dividing a document image into image data of a plurality of color components and reading out the divided image data, a determination unit determining whether the document image read out by the image reader represents a monochromatic image or a color image, and a processing unit processing image data.
The processing unit includes a plurality of processors dividing and processing in parallel the process of the image data, and a control unit assigning image data to be processed to each processor according to the determination result of the determination unit.